Well, this is big (if, as they say, true). I haven’t seen a formal announcement posted at the Department of Justice or U.S. District Attorney for the District of Columbia site (the USDA for D.C. was the one that indicted Awan and Alvi in the D.C. federal court in August 2017). But according to reporter Alex Pappas, Imran Awan and Hina Alvi have reached a plea deal, as of Tuesday afternoon (5 June 2018), with federal prosecutors.
https://twitter.com/AlexPappas/status/1004098772534689792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Luke Rosiak, longtime journo lead on the Awan story, is taking it seriously.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
After 7 delays and black+white evidence of misconduct in the House including server logs + invoices, hours after a negative story about DWS' role (her brother is a prosecutor in DC) prosecutors suddenly say they have a deal they did not have hours before. https://t.co/XRDKimwbFr
— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) June 5, 2018
Oddly enough, this news broke hours after earlier reporting that the prosecutors had moved to delay a hearing scheduled for Thursday, 7 June.
https://twitter.com/AlexPappas/status/1004055017656119296
Apparently, the plea deal was reached rather suddenly. So far the information has come across only in tweets. Assuming it’s valid, it presumably means Awan is going to sing.
How much he’ll sing, and about what, are real questions. He and Alvi were indicted on charges of “conspiracy to commit bank fraud, bank fraud, making false statements on a loan or credit application, and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions.” (A copy of the indictment is embedded below, courtesy Zerohedge.) But there’s a lot more that needs to be aired and sorted out about this case.
Interestingly, some may recall, the USDA for D.C. didn’t make an announcement about the indictment at the time, in August 2017. That was unusual for such a big case (Zerohedge quoted Andrew McCarthy to that effect).
It has also been of concern to many that Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s brother is an attorney in the USDA-D.C. office. Wasserman Schultz, of course, is the principal among the dozens of House Democrats who purportedly used the IT services of the shady Awan brothers. Indeed, LU carried earlier today the latest in Luke Rosiak’s continuing series for the Daily Caller News Foundation on the Awan saga, in which he reported that Wasserman Schultz’s zeal to protect the Awans from the most ordinary oversight and investigative measures on Capitol Hill has been virtually inexplicable.
According to Rosiak:
[W]hen a House Office of Inspector General cybersecurity investigation found that Awan made “unauthorized access” to House servers, including the House Democratic Caucus’ shortly before the election, Wasserman Schultz became “frantic, not normal,” “making the rounds” to House officials in an attempt to kill the investigation, one House employee told The Daily Caller News Foundation. …
Wasserman Schultz cornered House Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko and called him a “f**king Islamophobe,” saying “you will not so much as take away their parking spots,” the two House employees said Kiko told them.
But Wasserman Schultz’s special care for the Awans apparently went even further. Rosiak again:
Ex-Democratic National Committee head Debbie Wasserman Schultz said she intervened in a Pakistani land deal involving her then–IT aide Imran Awan, according to two House employees. The dispute came after Awan’s father was charged with fraud in relation to the deal, and the mysterious exertion of political influence resulted in Pakistani authorities instead targeting the elderly alleged victims, according to a local report.
Awan told people Wasserman Schultz chose the name for his daughter, Leza — a Jewish name — and that the Florida congresswoman’s daughter regularly rode a horse that Awan kept at a boarding facility, sources with knowledge of the relationship told TheDCNF. …
The congresswoman also told Kiko she had invited Awan’s whole family to her daughter’s bat mitzvah and said she had “helped him with a land deal,” the sources said.
I don’t think it’s too much to say this entire episode has been both bizarre and creepy. That it has shared characteristics with a massive Hezbollah cartel scheme, involving used cars and money laundering among other features, just makes it more suspicious.
What we can’t tell at the moment is whether the Awan plea deal will serve to effectively muffle him and minimize the political damage, or finally expose the extent of what this has all been about, regardless of how that affects the House Democrats who have circled the wagons around the incident.
The answer will depend on which “faction” in the Justice Department got the plea deal from Awan and Alvi. It is appalling to have to think in these banana-republic terms. But anyone who doubts that they apply has not been paying attention for the last 18 months.
We’ll see. This is a developing story. Updates if we get them tonight. To read up on the history, run a search on LU for “Awan” and “Rosiak.”
Awan Indictment by Zerohedge on Scribd
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